


the last place i saw you

by jameaterblues



Category: Gilmore Girls
Genre: 2008 United States Presidential Election, Canon Compliant, College, F/M, Growing Up, Nostalgia, Post-Season/Series 07
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-05
Updated: 2020-12-05
Packaged: 2021-03-10 05:08:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,173
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27888790
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jameaterblues/pseuds/jameaterblues
Summary: Just after Labor Day Weekend, 2008. After a visit to Stars Hollow, Rory makes a pit stop in New Haven for the first time since graduation. Walking through the Yale campus, she gets a full afternoon of nostalgia. Has everything else changed - or is it her?(Characters are tagged, but mostly mentioned - this is all Rory.)
Relationships: Lorelai Gilmore & Rory Gilmore, Paris Geller & Rory Gilmore, Paris Geller/Doyle McMaster, Rory Gilmore & Jess Mariano, Rory Gilmore & Marty, Rory Gilmore/Logan Huntzberger
Comments: 2
Kudos: 14





	the last place i saw you

**Author's Note:**

> This is basically to justify the fact that she has no reaction to breaking up with Logan after graduation after he PROPOSED, and also that feeling that you get when you go back to your alma mater and reflect on the good/bad/old times and all the feelings you experience along with it. I'm still new to writing fics, so comments are appreciated!!
> 
> Thanks to @AnotherAuthor for editing.

Pulling onto US 47-S, Rory found herself in a mixed sigh of relief and sadness. It’d been a rather incredible weekend, even if totally rushed in order to get back on the campaign trail. She and Lorelai had stuffed months of together time into Labor Day Weekend - they had barely seen each other since Christmas - months ago! - and she needed every bit of Stars Hollow summer to keep her going through the last few weeks of election season. 

She’d been able to cram in all the best parts of home, including a Friday night dinner with Grandma and Grandpa. (That particular “detour,” as Lorelai had called it, was entirely Rory’s fault. But she couldn’t help it if she’d wanted to check in with them, too!) She had initially tried to hide her visit from the rest of town: no one would see her, just a long weekend in the house with Lorelai and Luke and all the best food in a ten-foot radius. But of course, something like the return of Rory Gilmore couldn’t stay secret for long. Babette and Morey saw her as Lorelai pulled in the driveway, and then Ms. Patty stopped by and grilled her for all the dirty details about Barack Obama (“ _he’s so easy on the eyes_ ”), and then Taylor wanted to know if he could get her to promote Stars Hollow as a possible campaign stop the next time the Senator swung through Connecticut, and Kirk had some comments on her articles now that he’d taken on an editorial assistant role at the  _ Stars Hollow Gazette _ , and so on and so forth before it really just became easier for her to sit in the gazebo and have a town festival in her honor. (How many festivals were just her and Mom doing something rather ordinary and the whole town getting around it?) Somehow, in all the meet-and-greets, she’d snuck away to Stars Hollow Books and spent the little she had saved up at this job on the 2008 bestsellers. (Not that they’d be able to come with her - instead, they’d be sprawled across her bed for the next time she came.)

For all the time she’d been away, it seemed like nothing had changed- stuck in time, save the new trash cans around town that Taylor hoped would encourage recycling. Even the house didn’t feel her like hers anymore. As much as it felt good to come home and be in a familiar space, somehow her twin bed felt too small and the living room furniture too cramped, the clothes and books and paraphernalia all rearranged. Paul Anka had to readjust to her presence again (luckily, sugar toes worked just as effectively as last time.) She found herself walking through the house, almost as if she was in search of something that seemed super familiar. It was like stepping into a mirror universe:, everything so close to the way she remembered it but just off by the slightest bit.

Even Doris, her lovely little car, was feeling a little strange to her. Luke had been taking it out for a drive as regularly as possible - something about it being “good for the battery” - and she could feel it when she sat down, how he’d adjusted the seat and the radio station. Even the smell of her car was different - it had shifted from a caffeinated scent to a distinct Luke smell, some weird combination of diner grease and coffee and something else. She was getting so used to driving rental cars and riding buses that something that was hers felt so strange. She wondered if she was going to need a car in her next year? Would she sell Doris? Would she keep her in Stars Hollow like some kind of childhood toy, taken out for her visits on occasion but otherwise cooped up in the garage? It was so weird to think of someone else using her car - but then again, she’d already left Doris behind. She reached to the backseat and her seat pocket library, pulling out a spare copy of  _ The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath _ she kept here.  _ My spare book _ , she thought,  _ for all my spare parts _ . At least some things stayed consistent. At least some things were still under her control. 

Thinking over the weekend in full, it was nice to remember a place where everyone was rooting for her. Luke had printed her first major article on the back of all his menus - a short piece about the Senator’s speech after winning the Iowa caucuses - and every single person had raved about her work. And sure, she thought of all of them, too - she thought about them on the road when she met quirky undecided voters. Every small town had a Taylor, she’d realized - though nowhere else had anything close to a Kirk. She thought about them cheering her on, sending her stuff in the care packages Mom would send to meet her when she got to that destination. She couldn’t eat pancakes without thinking of the ones at Al’s Pancake World and hoping they would be even a little bit better. She couldn’t sit on town halls without comparing them to the many of her youth. But Rory also felt a bit guilty that she wasn’t thinking of them nearly as much as they thought of her. The weekend visit had reminded her that the 9,972 residents of Stars Hollow weren’t a part of her day-to-day life as they’d always been. It was weird to realize to find herself on this sprawling divide, where she found that this place wasn’t what she wanted out of life anymore. She had seen so many small towns making her way across Bill Bryson’s Lost Continent. And while none of them felt like Stars Hollow, she wanted to see them all. It was the only way she could know that someday she’d be able to make it back here and feel like she’d lived a life worth knowing. She was growing up, growing out, growing into whomever she was supposed to be. 

She’d thought about her Mom nearly every day, trying to channel her ingenuity, spontaneity, and charisma at every chance she could get. Her Mom was so good at these sorts of skills you needed as a journalist: getting people into her good graces and charming every room. She had the It factor that politicians dreamed of having - and she used it to rule over a tiny Connecticut town. And Rory - well, Rory didn’t. She was just Rory. She had her own strengths, sure, but push comes to shove, the ways the Lorelais differed was in their temperament. She just - she just wanted to find her thing. 

Mom had found her thing early on, and it had worked. She thought about Mom at her age. Mom at her age had a precocious daughter at Stars Hollow Elementary, working the night shift at the Independence Inn, trying to hold things together.  _ I guess we’re still the same in that way,  _ she chuckled at herself,  _ still figuring out themselves, still figuring out who they were going to be _ . She wanted so much more than the one-hour radius in which she’d grown up, and finally breaking out into the world in which she loved. 

She glanced up at the exit sign. She’d flown into Hartford, but she figured she would be much more productive riding Amtrak from New Haven to DC. She was going to leave her car at the station, and Mom and Luke were going to drive it back later that night. Lorelai had been persistent in trying to drop her little girl off at the train station (“We’ll reenact  _ Since You Went Away _ , me running alongside the train while you wave your handkerchief out the window!”) but Rory insisted that this was a good thing. “Besides,” she had told Lorelai, “Senator Biden is a big fan of trains.”  _ Maybe I can get that in a profile. Make it a narrative kind of thing, day-to-day on Amtrak while educating the public about the transportation infrastructure of this country.  _ In any case, she knew she would more likely fall asleep within two seconds of the conductor checking her ticket if not sooner. Besides, she wanted to see a little bit of the old stomping grounds of New Haven herself. She hadn’t been back since graduation.

Rory knew this highway like the back of her hand, having driven in it back and forth all the time in college. She knew each mile by its signage, the weird markers that stuck out along the way - the church steeple, the general store, the sign that highlighted some weird hiking trail. She found herself counting by the trees or the signs as opposed to the exits - she didn’t need to know the exits anymore.  _ Weird how those little things stick with you, without even trying. _ As she turned off the highway, she could already feel her heart fall into her stomach. She didn’t know that a highway exit could bring such joy and familiarity. Even Doris seemed to know instinctively the way to Yale as she put up the turn signal for the next location. 

Unlike most people in describing their college experiences, Rory never really considered New Haven home. It was a place she spent a lot of time, and sure - she had lived there. But Stars Hollow was so close by, and she would go home most weekends anyway. It wasn’t really until her senior year, once Logan was in London and she needed ways to entertain herself when she wasn’t working on class assignments, that she started to explore the city for herself. Coming back, she found herself a little disappointed at all the things she hadn’t done in college. She’d never hiked in East Rock, though Janet had tried to rope her into it many mornings. She’d never been to a frat party ( _ though the Life & Death Brigade must’ve made up for that.)  _ She hadn’t been to any of the New Haven community events, though she’d heard so many great things. Other than eating from every possible restaurant, she hadn’t done much at all.  _ Had I really missed out on so much? Did I really rush through college?  _ She hadn’t realized she’d missed this place - that it’d been so important and formative for her. 

She pulled into an open parking spot at Union Station - a little strange that the parking lot would be this empty. Looking over at her ticket, she took a deep breath.  She started walking away from Doris, following the street to pass by Durfee Hall, her old dorm from freshman year.  _ Thank goodness I don’t share a quad with that wild bunch anymore.  _ The four of them - Rory, Paris, Janet, and Tanna - had been the perfect match of mismatched roommates. She thought about how Paris had stayed up all night watching Spain’s election results roll in, shouting to no one in particular about the success of the PSOE. And the day Saddam Hussein was captured, and the screaming about Tony Blair’s accusation about Iraq possessing weapons of mass destruction and having ties to al-Qaeda. And the endless cycle of Janet’s running schedule conflicting with Paris’s sleeping schedule - there were weeks where it seemed no one in the dorm room had slept peacefully. 

The last she’d seen Janet was a couple days before graduation, celebrating at the bar. She’d been elected captain by her teammates for senior year, and was planning on taking a job with some securities firm.  _ Who knew Janet was into finance?  _ They were Facebook friends, and Janet had celebrated graduation by backpacking across Europe - Rory shared some of her tips from her visits. Tanna had been less clear - she was still dating the guy from freshman year, as far as she knew, and finished her biochemistry degree. She had applied for and won the Churchill Scholarship Scholarship, supporting a year of research at Cambridge. Rory had sent a nice note to Tanna before graduation. She wasn’t much for staying in touch with people, but it was a moment of goodwill. Freshman-year friends weren’t meant to last, and Tanna and her had never been that close. Although, they had both lived through the great wars of Janet and Paris, so there was something to that. 

Walking further on the green, she thought about how different it had looked last time she traipsed through campus. She almost wanted to go for a running sprint like she had with Lucy and Olivia, but the flock of freshmen around her convinced her to think twice.  Lucy was still trying to do the off-off-Broadway actress thing, in a bunch of experimental theatre things. She seemed to be really enjoying it, despite the ridiculousness of the shows she posted online. It was Joey on  _ Friends _ level of cringe, but Lucy seemed to take it in stride. Besides, Rory had seen her in some things at Yale: she was a good actress, when the performance was equally as good. She was starring in something called the Neofuturists, and Rory had promised to try to make a show after the election. 

Olivia was living with her in some artists’ study in Bed-Stuy, working in a gallery uptown. Olivia felt like it was selling out, but Rory had tried to convince it her it was very Charlotte on  _ Sex and the City _ . (Olivia had laughed at Rory’s poor comparison.  _ Whatever.  _ Rory didn’t read Candance Bushnell or watch the series on HBO, and only had the horrible first season reviews to go on.) It was nice to remind herself that not everyone had their lives together a year after graduation. Some people like her were still figuring out their next path, floating from idea to idea but endlessly happy. 

Thinking of Lucy always made her think of Marty. She wasn’t really sure what Marty was up to anymore - after their falling-out, Marty had fallen almost entirely off her radar. It was a shame how that ended, though she still thought about him when she caught a Marx Brothers marathon late nights in a motel. If she had to guess, he was probably moving back home for a bit. Or maybe not - things had gone poorly at home, if she remembered correctly.  _ Maybe he stuck around New Haven, became a townie? _ She winced at the idea of seeing him again. There was something about Marty where she always felt she was rubbing most of her Yale experience in his face. He carried himself around like a Dan Humphrey to her - well, she wasn’t going to compare herself to Upper East Siders, but something like that. She figured they’d run into each other at some point if he came for an alumni game - she probably would, with Grandma and Grandpa at some point. But other than that, she was fine with him being a blip on the time that was her experience at Yale otherwise. She did miss having a  _ Duck Soup _ buddy though - those posters she’d made for that fateful night were still sitting in Lorelai’s garage. 

As she kept walking, she found herself giving an involuntary gasp at passing by all the pizza places. New Haven was home to the best pizza (a statement she could now say with absolute certainty having tasted from multiple parlors across the country). Every student had their favorite - Sally’s, Pepe’s, Bar - but to be honest? Her favorite was the Domino’s. On a very late night study session, a greasy slice of pizza from that little place could be the worst-best thing that would perk you right up. It was a crime to say such a thing out loud, but it was a guilty pleasure that she would not give up for anything. 

And the coffee place down the street - the coffee on campus was much better, but you couldn’t get better pastries anywhere in New Haven. She was pretty sure the place was a front for the local Mafia, but if the local Mafia could make fried dough and sugar that good, she didn’t want to do anything to get in the way of the rest of their activities. She was still a little intimidated by the cashiers though. 

There was the Claire’s Corner Copia, with its mouth-watering Lithuanian cake. Ivy Noodle for some cheap noodles,where she and Marty had ordered from on occasion. There was the Bulldog Burrito, which she’d always pick up before heading home to Stars Hollow. The little Italian restaurant with the to-die-for garlic bread that she would go to with -  _ No, I don’t want to think about that just yet.  _

As she got closer to the other side of campus, she stopped in the window of her first great escape at Yale: the used bookstore.  _ Ugh, if only I had more time to step in and just browse the shelves for a bit. _ She loved how their basement had rows and rows of textbook orders for every class imaginable. As a freshman, she had strolled those shelves as a way to figure out which courses she should take - she’d nearly blown her entire book budget in one moment. (What she’d learned is that going back mid-semester, she’d be able to get twice as any books at half the price.) But it was magical to her - to be able to compare syllabi by the actual reading of the books, to literally see which professors were assigning whatever it is that she wanted to read that week. She’d also made some really incredible discoveries here, from a 1958 hardcover of  _ A Farewell to Arms _ to a collection of David Foster Wallace pieces that had somehow changed her life for that brief moment in sophomore year. Now all of those books were packed up in various boxes, or still stuffed into the furniture back at home. She didn’t get much time to read anymore, though she was always carrying around a few books as usual. You’d think the books wouldn’t fit into her suitcases or be considered essential for the ride around, but here’s the thing about bookworms - you always found a way to keep them if you needed to. She’d been able to swap out a few books she still had on the road, and snuck in a copy of  _ Cloud Atlas _ for the train ride.  _ After the article, and the nap, and the other things were done, of course,  _ she thought. _. Or maybe instead of. I’ll figure it out. _

And the Yale bookstore across the street - it was annoying like that, how there could be a university bookstore and an independent bookstore right next to each other. They seemed to thrive off of each other though, and Rory had been an active patron of both. She pulled at her Yale sweatshirt - it was getting a nasty hole right at the seams of her left arm and torso, but she didn’t really want to replace it. She knew it was pretentious to blare the Ivy League status anywhere outside of New Haven, especially on the campaign trail when the candidate was Harvard Law. But she always wanted to wear it - it felt safe, and it felt comfortable, and it was familiar. Lorelai had bought it for her right after she declared. “I’m sure you’ll get one from Emily and Richard, but I wanted to be the first.” It was a clearance item, a little small for her now and the letters faded even then. But she felt cute in it. She was sure that on the train, someone would notice her and try to strike up a conversation, as many had people had tried to do when she wore it out to a random convenience store at night on the campaign trail. She liked it. It was one of the few comforts that she got to carry around with her from stop to stop, one of the few things that reminded her of her roots in this crazy time where she had none. She’d buy a new one next time she came through. Better yet, she’d have Mom buy her one - tell her it was important, and use this one for Paul Anka. He needed to rock some Yale attire like every other Eli, and this would make him the most fashionable dog in Stars Hollow.

She passed by her and Paris’s place: 554 Howe Street, Apartment 8. She could just barely make out the light in her old bedroom, and the something by the door.  _ Funny _ , she thought, calling it Paris’s apartment, though it was accurate: Geller was on the lease, after all, while Rory jumped on and off a sublease as necessary.  She and Paris still texted pretty regularly. She and Doyle had had a great time in India the previous summer, according to the pictures. Rory felt a little jealous at seeing their vacation - she’d wanted that. She’d talked with Logan about something like that, once she figured out a job.  _ Oh, well,  _ she thought _.  _ Paris was loving Harvard despite the fact that all of her colleagues were “complete boneheads like those surgical interns on  _ Grey’s Anatomy _ .” Paris was already working on her new six-year plan - a joint JD/MD program, which meant a slight derailing of her time but didn’t seem to be of big concern to anyone. Rory wasn’t sure what Doyle was doing, but whatever it was, it was working. He was spending an awful lot of time at movie theaters, writing some stuff for the alt-weeklies in the area. He’d sent a review of  _ The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2  _ that, while nearly 10,000 words long, was actually pretty good. If she’d had the time to catch a movie these days, she’d probably go to see it. Or catch it on DVD in a few months - maybe next time she’d make it home, she and Lorelai could add it to their list of movies to watch. And their new condo in Boston was supposedly fabulous - right in Cambridge, near the T stops, but far enough from undergrads that Paris felt it was a true upgrade from everything they’d been through before.  _ How on Earth are the two of them paying for it? At least they seem happy. _

It was strange to see a new car sitting in her parking spot.  _ It’s much too big for Doris’s space. _ She noticed the large sedan had a little Obama sticker on its taillight.  _ At least their politics are in the right place _ . It was even weirder to think about this person going up the steps to that apartment, unlocking the many locks and carefully tiptoeing by the Doo-Wop group downstairs and the rich smell of pot that would surround them on any afternoon. It was even weirder to think that this person - these people, these college students most likely, were making dinner in that kitchen, avoiding the stains where Paris had thrown her pasta up on the wall in disgust or where Doyle burnt the latkes for Hanukkah (the apartment had stunk of burnt potatoes for weeks). This person would waltz into the bedroom where her stuff had once sat, using the furniture she had sold them (it had been left to her anyway by the predecessor, so she supposed it wasn’t really hers anyway.) She had a sudden urge to knock on the door and point all of the weird quirks of the apartment out to the new residents: how the blinds were missing one slot right in the middle, or how the toilet handle needed to be flushed twice before it really worked, or how the shower temp was extremely delicate if it didn’t hit the one place on the wall they had marked after Paris spent a weekend testing it out.  _ But surely they’d already figured all of this out _ , Rory thought. Perhaps they’d made new discoveries of the apartment that she hadn’t, or considered its quirks as boring and mundane as she had until moving out. It was her  _ first  _ apartment, and she would always treasure that. But it was someone else’s before then, and it would be someone else’s after, and her residency - short and disrupted and still important - was just another blip on its time as an apartment. 

Starting her way back towards Union Station, she stepped onto the green. She watched the kids - they looked like kids - on the green. _Probably their first week on campus, still figuring out where all their classes are._ _God, I don’t remember being that young. Was I ever that young?_ Surely in her day, she thought, they had looked much older and wiser and more powerful. _God, they look cute._ She glanced at a few students hovering around a coffee cart.. _My coffee cart._ It was the one Logan had rented for her junior year in his sad attempt to win her back. _It had gotten her back though, so how sad could it have really been?_ She thought for a moment about picking up her order from the coffee cart from the clearly confused and overworked undergrad working there. But she could imagine the whole scene in her head: she’d say something stupid, like “ _you know, I used to go here_ ,” and the undergrad would stare blankly at her, and she’d pay with the wHugog amount, and he’d tried to count through the coins and she’d finally just hand him whatever was left in her wallet (which probably wasn’t a lot, seeing as she almost never had cash on her anymore) and then tell him to keep the change. 

She did head in that direction, but she didn’t go over to the coffee cart. She didn’t want to go through it, even if she really wanted more coffee.  _ Christ, I still haven’t finished the one I’m holding.  _ Instead, she went over to the bench - Emily and Richard’s bench, where he had proposed to her grandmother years before. She wanted a reminder that this place wasn’t all about her - that Yale had belonged to lots of other people, and lots of other love stories:  _ Emily and Richard being one of the best love stories of them all. _ She wanted to remember the happy things about this campus that weren’t twinged with her own sad nostalgia. She remembered this bench, thinking of it fondly as it was here _. Does Grandpa feel this way, when he walks on campus? _ Did he always see it as this place of his youth, his folly, or did he map new things onto here as he grew older? 

She felt almost envious of them and the memories they would make here, what amazing things could happen if they just let them. They’d find their own ways to the best New Haven pizza places and the Mafia bakery and the off-campus apartments with Doo-Wop boys and the bars and the off-campus road trips. They’d have their own Paris and Janet and Tanna and Marty and Lucy and Olivia and Glenn, and Logan and - and all of them. Their own Yale to explore.

She felt her Blackberry buzzing in her pocket, and caused her to jump right up.. With her first real paycheck from the article, she’d bought herself a Blackberry for professional work -  _ just like the Senator _ , she’d told everyone. It was going pretty well, having the personal and professional phones, though staffers seemed to treat it like she was always awake and sending emails at all hours of the night. (To be fair, she was responding to them, so it wasn’t all their fault if they just assumed she was awake.) One phone with a Connecticut number, the other with a New Hampshire number - she received the weirdest telemarketer calls on that one when it came through.  _ It’s weird the kind of things you pick up like that as you get older _ , she thought. Places from stuff on the road, things that you’d never thought about in that way before. 

Walking by the  _ Yale Daily News _ office - the place she’d probably spent the most time on campus  \-  caused her heart to pang in her chest. She missed having a designated place to write, and colleagues to write by. On the road, you didn’t have that, especially for an independent magazine. She missed the opportunity to write about other things - normal things. The severity and importance of her stories had seriously stepped up since her days of writing dance reviews or Limewire articles. She missed the fluff pieces, the things that were just to fill space on the page. (That’s not what she was supposed to say as an editor, of course, but it was absolutely true that religion beat was just to occupy Paris.) She missed the camaraderie of that ragtag crew of reporters. Glenn had somehow wound up with a job at  _ Washington Post _ , a really good metro desk gig. (He was probably still halfway to a nervous breakdown at any moment.) As for the rest of the crew, they were mostly hanging out in the alumni Facebook group. The senior  _ YDN _ staff had had one last hurrah the night before graduation, full of drinking games and memories of all their best works. It was a good time, and Rory had nearly drunk her weight in liquor by the end of the night. She didn’t leave until 4 AM at least, and took a cab back with Paris to the apartment. She’d learned a lot about the rest of them that night, and said a lot of mushy, nostalgic things about keeping in touch and staying together. These were people she mostly knew by their bylines, not necessarily for their personalities or interests. The underclassmen who were still there worshipped her - she had written a correspondent piece for the paper earlier on, and they’d mailed a framed copy for Lorelai to hang next to her diploma.

It was her work at  _ YDN  _ that had prepared her so much for the world she was working in now. She’d managed to perfect her late-night-at-the-paper look, knowing how to turn last night's eyeliner into a professional work. She’d collected all her press passes for various events and kept them in a little tote bag from the Iowa State Fair. She’d learned what a podcast was, after Emily sent her a little iPod to listen to. She’d learned how to find the best bathrooms and get the best seats on the press bus if it was available, which reporters would give you tips, which ones were mentors, and which ones wouldn’t give you the time of day if you asked even nicely. She’d memorized Obama’s campaign staff’s names - knew their habits, knew when was a good time to find them, what to say to impress them and snag an interview when she could. 

Her boss had started dropping hints about taking on a more permanent role with the magazine, perhaps a DC Correspondent with White House privileges. The idea sounded awesome, never mind how incredible that could be for her career - to be one of the Press Corps, and to be so young. But she hadn’t let herself think about it - one of those situations where you can’t process the possibility until it actually happened.  To be honest, she wasn’t really loving campaign work - it was very fun for the first few months, but she didn’t expect for it to get so tedious, so quickly. In the early days, she’d liked meeting the field organizers. She wished she had time to write something a little other than politics. She didn’t realize that it wasn’t really what got her motivated to write about, not up close anyway - she didn’t have the same knack for policy as some of the other reporters. She wasn’t political in that way, despite being a political science major. She was still figuring out her niche - she wasn’t the incredible interviewer, or the person who knew the histories of every campaign staffer as much as she tried. Hugo clearly saw something in her, though - he’d asked her to do this job, supported her throughout the process, pushed her like an editor should. He was certainly mentoring her in all the ways she needed to be, though he wasn’t necessarily giving her the next steps. They didn’t have time for deep, long, insightful conversations like an advisor would have right now, deadlines and all, but she hoped they could at least have a conversation about her future soon. She’d probably keep writing for him, if he wanted - if the magazine wanted to keep her on, that is. She could be a regular contributor, though her summer in DC had given her the feeling it wasn’t the right scene.

She could go off and do something completely different. Maybe she could call up Christiane Amanpour, try to get a job at CNN. Surely she had something interesting to say now, about all the things she’d done.  _ Maybe I could say something insightful about - I don’t know, his acceptance speech?  _

But even then, it didn’t seem like enough to save her burgeoning politics reporter career. She loved the writing, and the rush for a deadline, and even the interviewing and having all of the fun. But the content wasn’t getting to her in the way it had back in college. The campaign was killing her drive. If she had to deal with one more undecided voter, she’d pull a Christine Chubbuck . She wasn’t exactly sure what she wanted to pivot to either. She couldn’t exactly fall right into another job, not easily anyway. Even exploring all the policy options, she hadn’t quite found her beat - labor? Education? Arts and culture? When Hugo offered the job to her, he’d said “Take it and in nine months the world will look totally different for you. You’ll have your pick of jobs in the next few months.” Then again, that’s what she had thought before then - that being editor of the  _ Yale Daily News _ , and the work under Mitchum Huntzberger, and being a great student in everything else, was supposed to make her the cream of the crop already.  _ Why did it have to be this hard? Why couldn’t she just waltz into a paper, the way Lorelai had waltzed into the Independence Inn, and get a job? _ She snorted, somewhat exasperated, and then as a laugh.  _ Isn’t that kinda already what happened? The job that dropped into her lap? _ Hadn’t she already fallen into this before, and couldn’t it happen again?

Her Blackberry started buzzing again.  _ Work, probably. _ She reached over to her work phone, clicking through the dozens of emails and texts that had come through. A couple interview requests, something Hugo had sent back for edits, a couple auto-responses for jobs that she applied to in the meantime. 

_God_ , she was going to be so happy when this was over. November 4 was going to be a day where she could let a huge breath out (hopefully, given that Barack was clearly a better choice than this Governor of Alaska that was being touted around.) She started going over the bucket list in her head, the things she was really hoping she could do on her next break - drive up to Boston to see Doyle and Paris; spend a day with Lane and the babies (be their real Lorelai Gilmore, though there wasn’t too much wild antics they could get into as barely walking babes); a day with Grandma and Grandpa, maybe at the club; getting to see that  _ In the Heights  _ show on Broadway everyone was talking about (she could blow a little money, even the little money that she had); take a very nice vacation to somewhere - maybe that trip to Asia? Or to Fez, with the money she’d still socked away in a drawer from Grandpa from way back in sophomore year of high school? Surely she’d be able to do something fun and exciting for a little bit, get back to that feeling of college. There were so many other decisions she was going to have to make soon: where did she want to go? Who did she want to be? 

She wasn’t intentionally walking in the direction of Logan’s apartment, but her body seemed to know the route anyway. She could feel the tears welling up in her eyes as retraced her steps from the  _ Yale Daily News _ to the apartment. It was unavoidable, the way she was trying to go - partly due to the fact that it was the way she was most familiar with getting to the train station, even if it wasn’t the most convenient (both by mileage and for personal reasons.) She laughed at that thought -  _ familiar, if not the most convenient.  _ That’s what a lot of this last year felt like - working through what she knew, and what she wanted to know, if not always the quickest way to get to the answers.  _ But that’s what my twenties are for, right?  _

Logan’s condo was by the more expensive buildings in town, a far cry from Paris’s place on Howe Street. She wasn’t quite sure what had happened to the place after he moved out - presumably, Mitchum still owned it, and it was just sitting dark in a town full of people who needed housing. That irritated her just a little bit, though she wasn’t sure if that was from Mitchum or envy from the idea of having any place to call home right now. 

As she looked at the condo from afar, she could swear that she saw him coming out the front door, headed over to class. She thought about the stupid knight in shining armor he had sitting in the entryway. There was that one night a drunken Finn had tried to put on its helmet and failed spectacularly, getting it stuck on his very slick, buttered head. She thought about the acoustic guitars he had lying around - not that he knew how to play, but he wanted to learn. She’d tried to teach him the basics, and painfully strummed through “La Vie en Rose” that she had learned with Lane. 

She thought about the bad nights in that apartment. The one where they’d fought before he flew off to the Caribbean for base-jumping. The time she moved out after learning what he’d done, when he’d cheated on her through their break. She thought about the lonely nights after he’d left, how she’d brought Lucy and Olivia back to the apartment in part not to make it feel so quiet and empty without their relationship inside. It was achingly difficult to live there without him, and now it was even more difficult to return there and no there wasn’t no longer a him to have around. 

She thought about the good nights, too - that last night before he’d left for London, the rocket on their dining room table when she woke back up. She thought about the first night she had moved in with him - the first time she had ever lived with a boyfriend, and the giddiness of that night as she thought of the apartment as theirs. They’d spent tons of time in the pool house together, but the apartment felt like hers in a way that the Gilmore residence hadn’t.  _ I mean, it was actually Logan’s _ . But it was also theirs. She knew where everything was, she’d picked some of the furniture, she’d had an entire dresser in that master bedroom of theirs. 

Passing by his apartment - their apartment, for it had truly felt like hers for some brief time - their relationship flashed before her eyes. For one thing, she hadn’t realized how much she’d missed sex with Logan - she hadn’t been laid properly in months, sex only crossing her mind after a handful of hookups on the campaign trail. She wanted good, real, desperate sex - even just to kiss and be kissed someone who knew what they were doing, and with whom she really enjoyed it. She wanted to have a passionate makeout on their couch, one of those sessions they’d fallen on top of at the end of the day, clothes scattered around the floor, woken up in the middle of the night before making their way to the bedroom. You couldn’t intimately kiss the nose of some one-night stand, she’d learned. You couldn’t lazily draw circles on someone’s skin, or watch movies while he kissed your stomach. Nor did anything feel as good as spooning someone you had a real, legitimate connection with, waking up in the middle of the night and remembering they were still there, and you were happy, and everything was fine. Sometimes, on those notes in the motels, when she couldn’t sleep after rushing to get something in under the deadline, she’d imagined herself wrapped in his arms. She’d felt guilty waking up on those mornings, imagining this person she no longer had a relationship with, trying to keep it going through the memories they’d had together. But she missed that part of Logan - being able to wake up next to someone, to have those moments of pleasure and joy where no one else was in the relationships. Those were the moments she’d really loved Logan, when it was just the two of them. In those moments, she wasn’t Rory Gilmore and he wasn’t Logan Huntzberger, but they were just together. 

_ I can’t do this.  _ She couldn’t look at the condo for very long without all these feelings rushing back into her. So she started hurrying back to the train station, the thoughts swarming her now. She hadn’t really processed the Logan break-up in the past year. It had happened- their engagement over before it began - and she was swept up in a whirlwind of graduation, and a possible job. And before she knew it, she was off on the Obama campaign. They’d barely even talked after that moment. She’d mostly packed up her stuff at Paris’s anyway, the lease almost up and ready to move out. She hadn’t figured out anything yet at the time.

In the months since then, she had only flirted with the idea of Logan occasionally. It was easy to keep busy with work, and she had enough going on. Both of them had drunk-texted each other once or twice, him a bit more than her. She’d Googled him one night while she was up late working on a deadline. His name appeared in the obvious places - the Wikipedia page, the old press announcements, the Yale press releases, Rebecca Thurston’s blog (surely she could hide that with a cease and desist) - and his name conspicuously did not appear on the Huntzberger Publications website. She had even looked at the News tab, trying to see if there were any insights there - there weren’t really, just references to Mitchum (and god knows she didn’t need more references to Mitchum for any reason at this point in her life.) She saw the birth of little David from Honor and Josh in  _ Town and Country _ \- the baby was pretty cute, and they seemed to get a lot of attention. 

But she didn’t see any trace of Logan - it was like he had totally disappeared from the world. Though she supposed it was easy to do that for most people who weren’t trying to build an “online profile” (whatever that means - the Yale Career Services kept mentioning it) but it must’ve been even a little difficult for someone of his status. It seemed like he was really trying to keep a low profile, start fresh in San Francisco, create a name for himself almost entirely. 

She wondered, for the first time in awhile, what he was doing out there.  _ Probably working at one of those little start-ups he was always following.  _ She wondered if he was reading her articles, keeping tabs on what she was up to. He’d read everything she’d written at Yale, and they’d always discussed it. He hadn’t thought much of Obama when they had talked about her interview. She wondered if that’d changed after seeing him on the campaign trail for so long - now that he was a presidential candidate, my goodness.  _ Does he think of me at all? Has he returned to Yale at all?  _ She doubted it, unless he came home for the holidays. She’d heard from Honor, right after the unceremonial dumping, who said she was sorry they wouldn’t be sisters but she could always rely on her for shopping adventures. They’d texted a little bit, but she really didn’t have time to keep up with Honor Huntzberger. Besides, it hurt too much to try - thinking about Honor made her want to ask what Logan was up to, to even get the slightest idea of what his life might look like at this point in time. She wondered if on some of those nights, when she thought about texting him, or even asking his opinion on a story, or wanting to share her little bit of joy of doing the work on the road, to show off just a little bit, he was holding his phone and thinking of her. 

She was still sort of proud of him, doing this on his own. When she’d mentioned it to Lorelai - the proud fact, that is - Mom had scoffed and tried to change the subject. But there was something admirable about seeing Logan grow over the past three years from this out-of-control wild child (at least in public persona) to something a bit more respectable, honest. He was really trying to make his way in the world, without his father’s footsteps or guidance. Sure, he was doing it at twenty-five instead of sixteen, but surely there was some kind of merit there. For all she’d admired about him, it was this she thought of most - him learning the value of a dollar, getting involved, doing the work to grow up. If she couldn’t be a part of it - well, she wasn’t a part of it - then she was at least glad to see it from the sidelines, at the very far distance she had placed herself. To at least have been a part of that at one point on his journey. 

She thought about all the things they never go to do - their trip to Asia, the things that she had planned on their great journey through Japan and China. She did get to visit him that one time in London, though she’d hoped it wouldn’t have been her only time there. They’d even talked about taking a graduation trip, once she’d picked a job - they’d been thinking about Iceland, getting to see the Northern Lights and maybe even camping. (“Camping, Ace?” he’d laughed. “Really? Are you trying to kill us both?” She thought about going to meet Honor’s kids, going to Huntzberger weddings, and weekends down in Martha’s Vineyard. At the time, she saw them building a life together - and then he gave her that ultimatum, and it was over. 

She wondered if he was dating someone new - surely if he wanted to be, there would be someone. Logan could always have a woman if he’d wanted to. She wondered if he was back to his womanizing ways, or if someone else would be taking her place as “girlfriend” - someone else in his arms, giggling with him. Someone else waking up by his side in the morning, or going out with him for brunch. Someone else he would take home for a disastrous Huntzberger dinner, take for a quick trip out to Martha’s Vineyard. Someone else to go to the gym with on Saturday mornings, or read the paper and do the crossword with. Someone to travel to Asia with or visit London or to take to company dinners. It was weird to imagine someone else in her place, and yet it only reminded her that there were girls before and after, like there would be guys before and after him, and that they were blips in each other's relationship histories.  _ She hoped.  _ She wanted to feel sad about losing that, but the truth was she had lost that a long time ago. It had been months since she had left, and she didn’t want a relationship right now, and it had been so long since she’d been one. But it was nice to be reminded of that safety and security and hopefulness that had once been the two of them. 

She was sure that someday she would come back across his name, his picture, and it would feel as awful as this would. That this wasn’t the last time she would feel her heart wrenching out from under her, falling apart at all they had built up and all they had put together. She knew that it was supposed to get easier - that with each time she would do this, it would become a little bit easier to go onto these memories and appreciate them, rather than see them as things of pain. As things from her past that were attached to a past her, as opposed to things that had a direct connection to the moment she was in today. Would she have taken the campaign gig and run away to deal with her problems if Logan hadn’t pushed her there? She wasn’t processing anything in that moment a year ago, and she was kinda just letting it all happen. The chance to run away, to make a fresh start on her own -  _ I guess, in some ways, I’ve made the same decision as Logan. _ Their same decision had just taken them in wildly different directions. She didn’t know. She didn’t really want to think in such complete terms. 

She found herself, as she drove around New Haven, imagining the future they could’ve had. If she had said yes, and she had moved to San Francisco, would she still have taken this job? Would she be out there, working at the  _ Chronicle _ or making it together on their own, figuring out the path? Would she come home to their tiny apartment somewhere up in Mission District, bringing the crappiest Chinese takeout for dinner to bond over while they traded stories about their workaholic days? Would they spend their weekends driving up and down the California coast, like some episode of  _ The OC _ ? Would they be enjoying their time as New England transplants?  _ Imagine if it could have just been the two of them, finding a way to make it work, on their own?  _

Of course, she hadn’t really chosen the “striking out on our own” way of making it work - not with Dean, not with Jess, not with Logan - she’d in some ways settled into the Gilmore family as a fall back. She had chosen to stay in that comfort - not really out of comfort, but out of the need to have a support system. And she hadn’t wanted that then, and she didn’t want that now - but something about seeing their place together (and she did think about it as their place together, as opposed to his place, because it had been theirs even for the briefest moment) reminded her of all she’d given up. They’d decided to work together, factor each other in, and then as soon as it was over she’d given it up And that was that, and they weren’t going to go the distance, and it wasn’t going to happen. 

She wanted to be able to move on from him - it’d be over a year at this point since the proposal. So much had happened since then, and yet she still felt like they were unfinished. They were headed somewhere, in some direction - maybe not a direction she’d wanted to go - but the relationship was over and done. And then, it happened. She figured a three-year relationship didn’t just disappear out the window like that. But she also wasn’t ready to open that door either - she had been perfectly happy to continue, if he’d wanted to, and he was the one who shot that down. She didn’t want to be married and safe - there was a whole world to see, and so many things to do, and maybe they needed time apart to figure out. She didn’t necessarily want a relationship with him. She just wanted closure, and a chance to finish it out. She hadn’t even told him she was taking this job - it just happened so quickly, and they were over, and she’d maybe wanted to at the time, but there was something else entirely going on for her. 

She hoped he was happy, that he was thriving in San Francisco, in a way that he hadn’t felt like he was able to do in London under the thumb of his father. She hoped he was enjoying it, still getting to be the fun-loving Logan while running his own start-up or whatever it is that he was trying to do. That he still had the things she’d given him, that he couldn’t look up at the moon without thinking about her. She wanted to know that she’d made a difference in his life, that this meant as much to him as it did to her. 

Crying felt so painful in this moment - she could feel her face getting red, and the tears flowing down her cheek, and the words getting caught up in her throat the whole time. She hated it, all of these feelings, and how much it had happened over the past year. She hated that this place she loved had become so full of memories, and how they felt like stones weighing her down as she returned to this place.  _ Things were so much easier here.  _

She was happy where she had ended up. She was happy to be here, she kept reminding herself. That New Haven was a good and wonderful four years of her life, for the parts of it she was actually in New Haven and not in Hartford or Stars Hollow - but it was a phase. That there would be other periods of her life in the future - other places, other apartments, and she would love all of them and hate all of them and build up so many memories that the whole thing would be wonderful and good and nice. She wanted to believe in that - it was hard to believe that here, right now, tears streaming down her face and hyperventilating - but it was hard to get it all in her head. 

If she had more time, she might stop. She might stop at all these places, knock on all these doors, have it hit her that the people she was looking for and the things that she wanted had all gone. She might try to live for a moment in the good feelings - the apartments, the New Haven pizza, the Yale sweatshirts and the campus coffee cart. But it wouldn’t last and it wouldn’t hold, and she didn’t have enough time. She’d probably unintentionally planned it this way - to not have enough time to experience all the things that would make her hurt and painful. Instead, she was running through all of these things in her head, all the had-beens and would-bes and could-have-beens and actually-weres, but not the realities of the situation. And the reality of the situation was that she needed to stop crying, get out of her car, get up to the platform, board that train, and leave it all behind. And in a few months, when this part was all over, she could come back and maybe it would all change. Or maybe it wouldn’t - maybe it would just be her that changed. Maybe she would just be over it all. Or maybe she wouldn’t come back - maybe the memories would be too painful, and she’d be too stubborn, and she could just ignore all of it for as long as possible and never see this place again. That wasn’t likely - a place 22 miles from home would probably be visited again, especially when she was an alum with tickets to the Thanksgiving game in a few months - but it was nice to know that maybe she didn’t have to. That she could shut the door on Logan Huntzberger, on this chapter of her life, if the option allowed for it. 

She thought about everything that had happened in the past year, that had been good. It was her first time traveling around the country, on her own, really. She’d applied some of those road-tripping skills from growing up with Lorelai all up and down the East Coast, and managed to apply them to even the longest bus ride. She’d seen the Pacific Ocean for the first time, when the campaign was doing a donor stop out there in California and she’d played hooky to get to the beach. She’d learned the thrill of stuffing an oversized bag into the overhead bin on the teeniest planes she’d ever seen. She’d met so many voters, some who just seemed to collect photos and autographs with every single candidate who’d ever existed. She spent a lot of time talking to campaign volunteers in New Hampshire, where Lorelai and Luke had driven up nearly every day to give her Luke’s Diner coffee. (The drive from Stars Hollow to New Hampshire was not worth it, she had insisted, but her mother was just so happy to see her hard at work.  _ Besides, it was better than bringing Mommy to Beirut, right? _ ) She had been to nearly every good food stop in the continental United States, taking pictures of the presidential candidates whenever she could. She’d learned the best way to drown out the sounds of every other room in the motels. She’d had an incredible time learning how to really write a story - not the kind she was writing at the  _ Yale Daily News _ , but the real ones that her editor seeed to tear to pieces and beat down into palatable things. She’d gotten her first Twitter account, though she didn’t tweet anything interesting yet. She’d practically memorized Barack’s stump speech -  _ Senator Obama _ , she was reminded to call him always. Overnight, she’d practically become an expert on healthcare and education policy, trying to teach herself by following up with the reporters. She’d learned how to take very good photos with her photographer friends, how to look for the faces in the crowd and find the truth in a moment. She had learned to write constantly, churning out at least an article a day and planning out dozens a week. She’d learned how to give the best hugs from Michelle Obama, and swapped book recommendations when she did get the chance to meet the possible First Lady. (Or at the very least, pass them onto her security.) She’d learned how to fake a Boston accent in Detroit to impress other voters (they couldn’t find Connecticut on a map), use her years of Spanish classes to get an undocumented DREAMer to share their story, and that the best place to get coffee on the road was always a little place like Luke’s. She met Hillary Clinton in a bathroom, totally by accident, when she’d complimented her own pantsuit. (She’d tried to text Paris about that one, but Paris wasn’t as impressed as she’d hoped.  _ “You’ve been idolizing her since Chilton, Rory.”) _

It didn’t seem like much on its own, but adding it all up in her head, it was incredible to see how much she had really grown as a person. She just wished there was more to do with it. She had been comfortable being alone, being on her own, even though she’d had boyfriends by her side for a lot of that time, but she didn’t realize how independent she was now that she’d spent all this time on her own. And now she was back in New Haven. 

She’d made it back to Philadelphia, where she and Jess had made up after her last visit and she even got to spend a weekend eating everything except Philly cheesesteaks. (It turns out that Philadelphia is a very good food city.)  _ That  _ night had led to an entirely different conclusion, one that they both agreed wasn’t necessarily for the best. Still a good night though. She’d collected postcards along the way, sending them back to Jess - a sort of lost cause, but someone to text and talk to through the loneliness. 

It’d happened with Jess, sort of by accident. When she knew she was going to be in Philadelphia for a day, she messaged him. Getting to meet people and spend time with them out of a journalistic context was hard, but she figured this would at least give her a place to stay for the night. They’d met up, it was nice, she’d slept in his bed - them on two opposite sides. He didn’t ask about Logan - she figured he’d probably already found out through Luke if he’d wanted to know, or guessed by the fact she had narrowly avoided mentioning it the whole evening. Not that Logan was coming up much in that conversation - they’d talked about all her adventures, everything she was seeing. He’d even brought her to the train station that day, extremely early, and he didn’t even say anything except to wish her well the next day.  And one night, a couple days later, it was very late. She was leaving some town hall, and her phone was almost dead as she was getting back to the hotel. And she felt a little delirious, and a little happy, and a little lonely that there wasn’t anyone to share it with. So she’d texted Jess, just a random  _ hi _ . And a couple minutes later - it was even later on the East Coast, she had no idea what he was doing out that late, but he did respond:  _ hi.  _ He didn’t ask, he didn’t say anything, he just responded. And they’d gone back and forth like that. She was usually the one to text first, though sometimes he did - her concept of time was very thrown off, so it always seemed like she was up at the appropriate time to talk. Sometimes he didn’t answer, but he always texted her as soon as he could. 

Jess had been this one guiding constant over the past few months. He’d been keeping tabs on her, even bought and saved a copy of the  _ Philadelphia Inquirer  _ when her article on the Reverend Wright controversy ran through the wire. Every once in a while, when she was having a bad night, she’d call him up and they’d talk. Not about being on the road, though he was probably the only person who knew what it was like. They just talked about the books they were reading, or the funny things she saw on television in the motels. They’d both turn on  _ Colbert Report _ and talk about it, just to have something. She wasn’t even sure he had a television, and maybe he wasn’t actually watching, but it felt good. Her mom used to be that person, that person that she could call anytime of day. But Mom was in a different place now - she had Luke, and in the inn was thriving, and Stars Hollow. As much as she loved it, she also didn’t understand what it meant to be able to leave and go somewhere else. Lorelai had only done that once, and it had worked out for her. Rory was still trying to figure out where she wanted to go next. She’d lived more places than Lorelai could even imagine, she figured. 

It was nice, them talking. It was nice in that they didn’t have to talk about themselves, or what they were feeling, or what was happening elsewhere. They didn’t have to talk about loneliness, or fear, or the mess of being in their twenties. He seemed pretty stable, from where he was anyway. Maybe he was just doing it to be nice to her. It was nice to have a friend like that again. A friend like that, ever. She wasn’t swapping out one boyfriend for another, but finding something completely different in him now. They were older, wiser, better. They were friends, and it was nice to just have another friend in their twenties, figuring it out. 

She found herself back in the parking lot of the Amtrak station, letting the tears fall onto herself. There was something really soothing about crying alone in her car for a moment - at least it was familiar, instead of some new motel on the campaign trail. She was back here, and the familiarity was too close and also too far away. Her stomping grounds, it seemed, had already been trampled by the new crop of Elis. The places she loved weren’t so much gone, as much as she’d grown. It’d changed since they were here together, and yet it hadn’t. And she hadn’t been able to notice the growing pains until she returned. 

She’d have to come back to New Haven someday. Probably a lot of times, considering it was the closest train station other than Hartford, and considering she was an alumnus already receiving donor calls from those poor student souls in the alumni relations office. And she wanted to be able to come back and look at this place fondly, not full of hopes and dreams and what-might-have-beens but just as another place in her past. And she wanted the next time she had to confront Logan - because God knows that day is coming when her ex-boyfriend is the heir to a publishing magnate and she was a journalist looking for a steady paycheck. If she hadn’t already been blacklisted in the Huntzberger circles, she wanted to be okay with it. 

She clicked open the car trunk, pulling her suitcase out of the back seat. She was starting to regret the idea of taking Amtrak all the way down to DC - the flight would’ve been much easier, even if it cut into her budget. Maybe she would actually get some work done. And maybe, by the time she reached the city, she’d feel a bit more alert and awake and enthusiastic. Maybe she wouldn’t spend the next few hours sitting with the sinking feelings of nostalgia in New Haven. Maybe she could sleep it off, or write it off, or get so thrown back down into her work that all of this could just go away. 

She stood on the platform, waiting for the train to arrive. She pulled out her personal phone. 

She texted Paris:  _ drove through New Haven today. looks like the doo-wop group downstairs moved out. it looks so different here.  _ Sent.

She texted Lorelai:  _ leaving the car in its spot. thanks for the weekend - I’ll be back home before you know it.  _ Sent.

She texted Logan:  _ hey. I’m in New Haven, and I miss you.  _ Draft. 

She texted Jess:  _ you really can’t go home again, can you?  _ Sent. 

She placed it back in her purse, switching it out for the Blackberry. 

She texted her editor, Hugo:  _ break over. officially back to work.  _ Sent.


End file.
